Debut writer shines with 'Twilight'

Published 10:00 pm, Friday, October 7, 2005

It's been a while since "Forks, Wash." and "hot" appeared in the same sentence but, then, the tale of Stephenie Meyer's rise to riches is improbable from start to finish.

Meyer, 31, is an Arizona mother of three who was deep into diapers and potty training when she awoke one day from a seductive dream about two teenagers in a rainy woods.

They were talking about the fact "they were in love with each other, and that he was a vampire, and the difficulties of that," Meyer said. "It was very tender and yet the potential for violence was also there."

The dream's meaning mystifies her to this day, but there's no denying its life-changing consequences.

From that fevered vision came a hot literary property -- "Twilight" (Little, Brown, 498 pages, $17.99), a teen-vampire romantic thriller set in Forks, Wash. -- a town Meyer hadn't even visited until last summer.

With neck-snapping speed, the stay-at-home mom found her dream turned into a $750,000 book deal, a movie option from MTV Films, a publicity tour and a big buzz factor. Teen People, for example, cites "Twilight" in the "Hot List" of its upcoming November issue.

"It's still a mystery to me," said Meyer, sounding genuinely bemused. "I never intended to be a writer."

As an English-lit major at Brigham Young University, Meyer was more interested in reading books than writing them. She worked as an office assistant until the birth of her first son eight years ago.

Yet here she was in Seattle, giving the first interview of her first book tour, with only a little coaching from the Little, Brown publicist at her side.

Meyer is trim, pale and dark-haired -- sort of like her vampire characters, only without their under-eye circles and air of menace. She speaks at a go-go pace and has a brand of sporty energy that proved useful as she pushed through the alien mists of the publishing world.

She also drew focus from the dream itself, which was so arresting she felt driven to write it down before it faded. As she wrote, the images grew and swelled and Meyer came to see the makings of a novel.

"It was very obsessive," said Meyer, who whipped out the book in three months. "I didn't have outlines. I didn't have a synopsis. I just let the story go where it wanted to go."

"Twilight" opens as 17-year-old Bella moves from Phoenix to gloomy, rainy Forks, on the Olympic Peninsula, to live with her divorced father.

Just as Bella seems resigned to the dull predictability of small-town life, she meets the seductively intense Edward Cullen, who draws her like a magnet, even as he warns her he's no good for her because ... Let's just say the handsome and conflicted Edward has appetites that aren't on the USDA food pyramid.

Why a vampire dream?

"That's the weirdest thing," Meyer says. "I don't know where it came from. I'm not a vampirey person."

But she thinks readers like vampires because "they're beautiful, they're cultured, they can live forever. Vampires have that alluring edge to their horror."

As for the other obvious question -- why Forks? -- Meyer said, "I knew from the dream I needed someplace rainy. So I went on Google and looked up 'rainy' and got 'Olympic Peninsula -- rainiest place in the U.S.' " Or words to that effect.

The Web yielded enough geographic detail to flesh out a convincing portrait of Forks, with its Thriftway and its sporting-goods store and its modest library on the main drag, though the town's essence was largely a product of her imagination.

Having little notion of how to get in print (but thinking it might be nice to pay off her MasterCard bill), Meyer trolled the Web again to learn how to submit a manuscript.

"You don't wrap it up in brown paper like they do in the movies," she learned. "It looked like you needed to get an agent, which was very intimidating."

Her break came thanks to an agent's assistant who plucked her query from the slush pile and pitched it to her boss. The agent quickly peddled Meyer's proposal to nine publishers.

Little, Brown bit first, with a $300,000 offer her agent turned down -- to Meyer's profound horror. She was still reeling when her agent added the kicker: "I went back and asked for a million."

When the dust settled -- a mere two weeks after Meyer signed with her agent -- she had a three-book deal worth three-fourths of a mil.

As Meyer excitedly spilled the details of her unlikely jackpot, it suddenly struck her how this might sound to all those authors laboring in threadbare obscurity. She stopped, abashed.

"Ohhh," she murmured, "other writers are going to hate me."

Well, yes. But it turns out Meyer has had characters and plots churning inside for years and thinks she's just been suppressing them. So maybe her saga isn't so unlikely after all.

"It was really a matter of believing that I could," she said, "and that people would be interested in my stories. You can look at it as being lucky. You can look at it as being blessed."